There were things that I could do like any other normal teenager, that I didn’t have to feel insecure or different about, and my absolute favorite was driving. When I was sixteen my sight was good enough to take the driving test, and my ophthalmologist assured me that it was all right for now, as long as I didn’t drive at night.
I have always loved driving, and I was always excellent at it, as I still tell everyone who will listen, repeatedly. Though it’s been years since I’ve been behind the wheel, I want them to know. Because of all the things I’ve lost, it was, in many ways, the hardest. As a teenager, there was nothing I was more excited about than getting my license, the ultimate ticket to independence. My dad was with me the morning I went to the DMV to take my test (which I passed with flying colors), then I dropped him off at the BART station and drove to school for the very first time by myself. I promised him that I wouldn’t turn the radio on, and I was true to my word, completely focused and hyperaware of everything around me, so thrilled to finally be the one behind the wheel.
Sometimes I’d take the long route home from school to pass by as many after-school hangouts as I could, so that kids who knew me would see me driving. At school, I’d walk onto campus in the mornings, trying to look cool and collected while twirling my keys in my hand, hoping that the jingling would attract attention, and if anyone noticed I could say, “Oh, these? These are just my car keys. I almost forgot I had them in my hand!” Why I thought this would totally wow people I’m not sure, but I was convinced that it made me exponentially cooler and more desirable.
I’d head into homeroom, slide into a chair and drop my car keys with a big clank on the desktop in front of me, wait for my name to be called for roll, then take my sweet time putting them away in my backpack. For effect, I may have even struggled a little to find the right place to put them so that it would be clear to my classmates exactly what I was doing. I’m sure I looked like a total dork, but it was my first step toward real independence, and I relished it.
If not being able to drive at night was hard, giving it up altogether was wrenching. I had already moved to New York, a city made for pedestrians—half the people I know who grew up in the city don’t drive—and part of the reason I chose New York was so that I wouldn’t stand out so much or feel so needy. For all of its craziness, New York is a wonderful city for pedestrians. But to lose the freedom of driving, the joy that being behind the wheel gave me, the concrete evidence of my independence, devastated me. I can admit now that I drove long past when I should have stopped.
One of the last times I drove, when I was twenty-seven, is one of my most vivid memories. I was cruising back to the city from the Hamptons, alone in a convertible with the top down, singing along enthusiastically to the radio. I felt totally free, and loved the faint smell of the ocean and the feeling of the wind whipping through my hair. I wanted so badly to just keep on driving and to just say the hell with this, I am not letting this be taken away from me, too, not this. When I visit my family in California I ache to drive along the beautiful redwood trees that line the curvy roads of Highway 17 to Santa Cruz, or to cruise down the Pacific Coast Highway, watching the crashing waves below as I expertly navigate the turns, totally confident in myself.
I’ve promised myself that I won’t dwell on what I’ve lost—it’s a waste of time, and I know just how precious time is. So I try not to mourn it, but instead to look back and see that girl, the one with the wind blowing through her hair, feeling so completely independent—so alive and free—and to know that she is still inside of me, and that this is a memory that will stay with me, stay part of me, forever. For me, memories of things I have lost or can no longer do are incredibly vivid, almost like I could step right back into them, as though the past were right here next to the present. We all lose things, and I will suffer far worse losses. We all will. I have only one choice, and that is to keep on living while looking forward to what is ahead, rather than back at what has been lost. Helen Keller once said, “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” I try every day to remember that, because I need that to be true for me.